


Learning Connections

by Stranger



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M, friendship sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:37:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8349370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stranger/pseuds/Stranger
Summary: Sam and Daniel are friends.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set in SG-1 S2 after episodes "The Fifth Race" and "Holiday." Written in 2001.

"That's the fiber-optic cable," said Sam. "Don't let it near the red one. Hold them in different hands."

"Okay." Daniel held the blue-plastic-insulated cable in one hand, carefully about two feet away from the red-plastic-insulated heavy wiring that Sam needed to plug into what Daniel had mentally dubbed The Octopus among her lab equipment. He had no idea what it did, but it was big and gray and had about a million connector ports for various kinds of cables, and if he put one lead into the wrong socket Sam was going to kill him dead, or maybe the Octopus would electrocute him first. 

"That's fine," said Sam, distractedly. "Now take this one and don't let it touch either of the others." It was black and probably electrical. She draped it over his shoulder, and picked up four vari-colored cables of her own. "Now we do some three-dimensional weaving. This is so much easier with another person holding up some of the ends."

"I suppose that's why you waylaid me at two in the morning."

"You were already around." She had maneuvered halfway around The Octopus and reappeared minus one striped cable, her eyes still searching the lower rank of attachment ports. "Besides, can you imagine me calling up Supply in the middle of the night and saying, 'Send over an airman, and make sure he's at least six feet tall'? I'd never hear the end of it." 

Daniel snickered. "When you put it that way, I'm glad to help out. By now they've said everything they can about me."

"Nobody even knows you're here. Besides, you're a civilian."

"And proud of it."

"I didn't mean you're not… Wait. Right now, turn ninety degrees to your right."

Daniel turned. "I'm not what?"

"Never mind." She shoved one lead into its housing and tightened screws around it. "Fill in the blank yourself. And you're six feet tall. Don't let any of those down yet." She ducked under his blue-cabled arm, trailing green and white and thin yellow like party confetti.

Daniel stood, now attached to The Octopus by cable. It was childish to feel slighted. Sam unhesitatingly trusted him to juggle deadly cables at any hour of the day or night, and that was no reason to whine about "civilian" being the Air Force equivalent of "neuter."  "Is this like defusing a bomb?" he asked brightly, contemplating the web of cables they were creating.

Sam did something that made the green cable twitch. "Not really. More like building one."

"You've built bombs?" 

The white cable twitched. "Not live ones." She sounded thoughtful. Green and white twitched together. "I can make the big ones if you give me enough heavy-element material, but they're pretty crude. If you want surgical explosives, the colonel's better at it."

"Oh. That's so…" cold, he wanted to say. Military. So unlike Sam-the-person, who had saved Cassie from a naqahdah-bomb nightmare. "It's a pity you weren't with us on the first Stargate trip to Abydos. Jack had some trouble with the equipment." 

"With the nuclear warhead Ra stole," she said calmly. "It was in his report." She moved further around the machine and did something with the yellow cable. "Both reports, in fact." After some scraping and rustling she reappeared holding only one cable. The yellow and white ones remained fixed and quiescent on the floor. 

"It got stuck on 'forward,' or something," he said. "It was a good thing we had a place to send it in a hurry." Remembered fright, relief and triumph echoed in his memory and collided with his late-night random mood in an adrenaline rush looking for a place to go. It headed for his groin. 

Oh, damn. Where was an anti-fertility god when you needed one? Maybe Sam wouldn't notice. She was pretty busy.

"Okay," said Sam, oblivious, "now make sure you've got the black cable secure and slide out from under the blue cable. Keep the two cables you've got apart. They're both high-voltage, and we don't need fried archaeologist on the walls here." She turned and attached her remaining cable to another behemoth piece of equipment. It was the Whale, decided Daniel, trying desperately to think about something other than life, death or sex. Whatever the Whale was, it was big, and mostly square and gray. 

Sam picked up two bundles of varicolored wires and began sighting between invisible points on the Whale and the Octopus. "These go under those…" She backed up too quickly and bumped hard against Daniel, who was holding a perilous cable in each hand and couldn't defend himself. 

"Ow!" 

He had raised the cable ends away from any possibility of touching her, but he'd paid for it. Hard was going soft with pain, but — damn adrenaline rush. Damn anatomy.

She stepped back. "I'm sorry."

"It's not… not important… but…" He didn't want to explain, and having to stop and gasp wasn't helping. "It'll be all right in a minute."

"Did I step on your foot?"

"No. Nothing important. Never mind the man behind the curtain. Just go about your business."

"What?" She half-turned and looked at him. He must be red, he supposed. Daniel saw her eyes stop halfway down his body and felt himself turn redder. "Don't… I mean… It's nothing you should worry about."

She spared a moment of concentration from the multicolored wires. "Ahhh, oh, I'm _really_   sorry. Hold on a minute, while I get these placed." She began clipping a cluster of tiny wires into tiny holders.

He was feeling less pained but no less embarrassed by the time she said, "Okay, now. Just connect the red cable to this top positive terminal, when I say. Not until I say." She picked up a red cable of her own, positioned herself by the Whale and glanced at the readout panels. "On my mark of three. One. Two. Three!"

They lunged in concert, and two connections came into simultaneous being. The mated behemoths gave an electronic hum of satisfaction. 

"That's it," Sam all but crooned at the Whale, before she looked up at Daniel. "We're doing fine. Same thing with the black cable. Connect yours to the lower terminal, but not until I say."

They repeated the countdown, the lunge and the hum. Nothing shut down or blew up. Daniel let out his breath. "Now what?"

Now we let it warm up and boot up. At least ten minutes." She slid down and propped her back against a relatively bare flank of the Whale. "Better now? I hope I didn't do any damage." She nodded at his crotch, not quite looking.

Daniel shrugged and sat next to the Octopus. They were both embarrassed, but they were alone with no one else to laugh at them and they were both adults. "It was just a reflex, or something, and you caught it at the wrong time. I… It's nothing personal."

She hesitated, looked up at the faceless humming machines, at the oversized room designed for the machines rather than humans, at the several feet of space between them. "What were you thinking about? Just as academic curiosity." 

"I'd better take the Fifth." 

"Come on, tell. If it wasn't personal, then what was it? I have no way of knowing what that kind of thing means in someone's head, and I have to work with mostly men. I need the data."

"All right, it's personal," he said. "I mean, it's kind of like dreaming. You don't always know why it happens, and some part of you does it without telling you." She was listening, not smirking, not laughing, as seriously as if to any of his anthropological lectures. "And usually nobody talks about it. So nobody describes it much."

She looked at him. "It's not like I could ask anyone else, or tell anyone else. Just, well, you're someone I can trust to give me a real answer."

"Oh." He didn't quite know what to think. Late nights and acute embarrassment weren't conducive to clear reasoning. "You're welcome, I guess. Taboos are funny things. It's a way of making you not think, not remember things. It's positively unscientific."

"Well, while we're ignoring this one — just for right now — can I ask another question?"

"Only if you don't mind if I decide not to answer it."

"Sure thing. Free zone here, no touch, no foul. Scout's honor." She held up three fingers. "Anything you say is all gone in the morning. Like a dream."

"Uhh." Sam must have been a serious tomboy. Still was. "Okay."

"Well, this is kind of personal too, but…"

"Go ahead," he said, resigned but also amused. They were both past blushing by now. "Just remember I expect an honest answer when I ask you about G-spots."

"There's no such thing," she said promptly. "It's a PR gimmick. But, well, I kind of wonder if you've ever made the first move in your life?"

"With a woman?" he asked, warily.

"I'm not asking about chess."

"Oh, all right. I'm not sure." He tried to think about it. "I mean, define 'first move.'" 

"Initiating sexual contact." 

That wasn't actually much help. "By the time the contact is sexual, it's not a first move. But, well, just as a general thing —" He had to reassess his love life in a new light. "I guess not." He wasn't going to elaborate. That was a different taboo. But Sam was right. 

"You never thought of it that way before, did you? You don't worry about who makes the first move." 

"Not that I remember." 

She smiled at him without otherwise moving. "You know, that's sort of cool."

Daniel made a connection suddenly, one he should have made about five minutes earlier. "Umm, Sam, what's your stake in asking all this? Just curiosity?" Suddenly he was blushing, and not for some stupid so-called gallant reflex he couldn't help. This time it was his fault. "Oh, I should have seen where you were going. I'm flattered, you know, but…" Sam said something he didn't hear through embarrassment and staring at his knees. "What?"

"Ummm, oh, I didn't mean… Daniel." 

He looked up. Sam was sitting perfectly still, staring at him, and now _she_   was blushing. For a change. She spoke in a rush. "I didn't I mean anything with it. I thought I didn't mean anything. I wanted to know something and I knew you'd tell me. I was being selfish and greedy, because I knew you'd tell me what you really think, because of how you are about truth." She took a quick breath. "But it only works because of who you are and it kind of is about you. In a way. I'm sorry. The free zone thing went to my head. Take away the taboos and I'm an animal. I guess that's why we have them."

Daniel sat stunned for a moment under the cascade of words. "It's— It's okay, Sam. I'm flattered that you think of me like that."

She looked up, eyes widening. "You are?"

The surprise was so comic that he almost wasn't insulted. "Sam, any man alive would be honored if you… liked him."

She snorted indelicately. "If that's the case, I seem to meet a lot of dead men."

Daniel shrugged. "Not all."

"Well, just for the record, I like you. I don't mean to trespass on any taboos. It's just, you know, an interesting fact."

That was quite a positive assessment, Daniel supposed, from the Air-Force-born-and-raised Sam. "Thank you." 

She got to her feet. "It's up and running, and I have to do some work now. That gadget the colonel built while he couldn't talk is burned out, but trying to figure out how it did what it did should tell us something. That kind of power generation could be handy."

"He could talk. It wasn't English, but it was a language."

She grinned conspiratorially and offered him a hand to stand up. "You know that, and I know that, but does the colonel know that?"

"It wasn't the language change that bothered him. It was his whole mind," said Daniel, dusting himself off unnecessarily. Sam's lab was clean, floor and all. It was one advantage of the closed environment of the underground base. He almost didn't have hay fever, on the base. It wasn't quite enough incentive to put up with the Air Force in itself, but it helped. "He was thinking in ways humans never have, never could before. That would scare anyone."

"Maybe that's why he looked so unfamiliar while he was, you know, downloading. Do you think he was really frightened? That's just not an O'Neill concept."

"I think he was. For once in his life. Don't repeat me."

She uncovered the mad-scientist-looking power booster or whatever it was, already hooked to a multiple-readout panel by an array of wires. A matching array sprouted from one of the bundles of wiring she'd been working with while Daniel served as a human cable stand. "It's between you and me. Scout's honor." She looked up at him. "Umm, Daniel? Thanks. It's good to know, you know?"

"I'll let you work now," he said, wondering if he ought to be thinking what he was thinking. "You're welcome. Really. We must have these little chats more often."

She didn't look up, but the edge of her mouth that he could see turned upward and a hint of dimple appeared near it. "Any time."

# # #

Sam stared at a jumble of letters and signs that made no sense. She knew some alphabets and a number of Goa'uld signs. It would have been hard not to after working with Daniel and Teal'c for over a year. Machello's notebook — it had real Notebooks beat for size, if not versatility — made no sense in any of them. 

She sorted again through the printed-out scans of Machello's several dozen "pages" scattered over her dining-room table. She and Daniel were working at her house today as a change from the monotonous atmosphere and the interruptions on base even during nominal downtime. Afternoon sunlight filled the room, bright and clear and neither too yellow nor too blue for the eye's comfort. She noted, automatically, that it cast only one shadow.

Sam sighed silently. She really ought to get out more. On Earth.

She pushed aside the pages that were blocks of unreadable text, looking for the schematics. Those, she might have a hope of understanding. The label symbols were kind of Greco-Roman and kind of pictographic. Daniel had said something vague about "Phoenician," before he ducked into Sam's kitchen to look for coffee, leaving Sam less enlightened than ever. She lacked Daniel's ability to manipulate whole alphabets like variables. 

Okay, she said to herself, an alphabet is a group of symbols, each equating to a sound or meaning that depends on a number of invisible factors, some known and some unknown… In this case, some were unknowable. They hadn't been able to save Machello for long enough to learn anything about his writing, and none of the body-switch victims had acquired any information along the way. It was good, really, that the personality transfers had been so clean and complete. Sam knew she was glad to have her team back as themselves, all of them, not blurred by extra or missing memories — but none of them knew anything Machello had not told them aloud. 

Daniel returned with two mugs of hot coffee and an appalled expression. "Sam, what happened to the bag of Kenya beans you had in the freezer?"

"I drank it up."

"You only have instant left."

"That's right," she said mildly.

"I know you know better."

She shrugged. "I'm a philistine. There's good coffee and there's bad coffee, and it's all coffee. What can I say?" She grabbed the mug he held out to her, the one with milk added, and drank a near-scalding mouthful. "Thanks." She nodded at the page in front of her on the table. "That symbol group at the top looks almost Greek, but I don't see what it can mean."

"Mean?"

"It looks like 'pao' or 'rao' or something. I don't suppose that's a word in Greek?"

Daniel rubbed his free hand through his hair. Previous iterations of the action had already left it so tangled that the gesture no longer had any effect. "It doesn't have a meaning like a word. This is just one of the symbol groups Machello used. It's not a language — he said it wasn't. It's a code."

"Well, some of the symbol groups fall into patterns." She thrust her pencil at various places on the two pages spread in front of her where 'pao' or whatever it was recurred with unpronounceable squiggles similar to each other.

"So they do. But the one thing those groups don't mean, is whatever they might look like in a known alphabet." He wrapped both hands around his coffee mug and took a careful sip, then drank half the mugful quickly and put it aside. "I wonder how long Machello had been alive. It might give me an idea of what language he started with."

"Janet said he was about ninety, physically."

Daniel grimaced. "Don't remind me."

"Sorry." The round of musical bodies hadn't improved anyone's temper.

"Oh. Don't be. That was just a rhetorical complaint about the strangeness of the universe." He gave her a cautious smile. "You being there was about the best part of the whole experience, believe me. Well, except for being Jack and knowing I wouldn't have to stay that way." 

She giggled. She couldn't help it. "There's nothing like weirding out your C.O. and getting away with it."

He let that go by, waiting as if for a punch line, and then his eyebrows rose and spread. "Sam, that was insubordinate!"

"Yep," she said cheerfully. Being in her own home, her own space, put her into a different mindset. It wasn't at all the same as being off-base and off-duty in the colonel's house. "It only happens under carefully controlled conditions, mind you, but it has its place."

"Ah ha. Is this worthwhile as blackmail material?"

"Not without evidence." 

He pushed back his hair again. "It's just surprising."

"I'm a woman of mystery."

He grinned, then sobered. "Sam, don't take this wrong, but that's practically a tautology."

"All women are mysteries?" she lobbed back.

"Uhhh…" From the sound, he didn't want to answer, and he _had_   to answer questions. It was just part of Daniel's makeup.

She took pity on him. "It's okay. I know. Men and women don't think alike about some things. Explaining wouldn't do any good." She felt vaguely sad. Men, even Daniel and the rest of SG-1, were always men.

Daniel's eyes fell to the printouts on his side of the table as he said, "Something like that. If there's a female culture that's hidden from men, it could mean that what women do makes sense in that context." 

"Implying that women don't make sense otherwise," she said. 

"Any anthropologist can tell you that it does make sense. Women make sense. Men don't always see how." 

"Yeah," she said, both irritated and relieved. He thought he knew it all and he was trying to have it both ways, but at least he was working at it. "You do realize that the majority of women — here and now, that is — don't have a good concept of female culture, and most men don't get it, even when they think they do?"

"Touché. All I've got is a theory. I didn't take it further than that when I was figuring out the hidden-culture idea from watching friends of mine in college." 

"Female friends?"

He smiled slightly, still directing it down at the page full of unreadable symbols. "Yes. It took me a while to see it, and then it scared me off, and then I was busy doing a different thesis anyway."

"Scared you off what? Dating women? Having them as friends?"

"Something like that. It was like — it was — interfacing with a culture where I could maybe learn the language, some, but I couldn't really participate. I was the butt of the joke and that was all I ever could be."

It was Sam's turn to stare down at Machello's symbols as the words made too much sense, feeling herself go into some kind of emotional overload. She was trembling helplessly with… with…

Anger.

Anger? At Daniel?

Why?

Don't scream. Don't cry. Figure it out. Explain it to yourself and then see what needs to be done.

The butt of the joke. It fell into place.

"Daniel." He'd had all that training. He tried, hard. He might understand. "How do you think women feel in American society, _all the time_  ?"

He looked up at her, smile gone. "Oh."

She couldn't stop. At least her voice stayed level. "It's not personal. It's not you or the colonel or even the general — thank God, because a bad base C.O. is a nightmare. Teal'c at least knows he's a fish out of water. I know what he feels like and I can't help him because I don't know what he came from or what he needs to become. It's not any one man. It's everyone, and most of the time you — I — don't even notice because there's no other system, no alternate environment to compare it to. Women's culture is practically invisible even to women. Mainly it's a bunch of shared jokes and viewpoints."

He nodded, watching her. "Maybe you're saying — tell me if this is right — that women's culture isn't completely different from the parent… um, the surrounding society. It's a reversed image, not a different image."

"Maybe. Some ways. The, uh, bad jokes about men are nearly as bad as anything I've heard about women-as-chicks, if that's what you're asking." 

"And if knowing about it put me off… um." 

She was pretty sure she knew what he might have said in the pause. "Um, yes. Except it doesn't, really."

He looked down quickly. "Doesn't put you off what?"

"Off men. Being interested. Sometimes just academically. Sometimes more. And knowing about the jokes leaves me feeling stupid for feeling anything."

"Oh." He riffled furiously through a dozen pages, too fast to be reading them. When he came to the end of the stack he turned them back over and said, "Sam?"

"Yes?" She was calm again. Maybe.

"You're not a joke. Not where you are, what you do. Not how you think. Do you know…" He looked at her, eyes frowning apologetically behind the glasses. "Maybe you've guessed that I think the Air Force is mostly a joke, except that it's too big and powerful to ignore." It was said as a kind of confession, not a challenge.

She raised her eyebrows. "It has something you want, so you deal with the devil?"

He looked faintly embarrassed. "Not the devil. Not even close. But… a lot of it is unnecessary for my purposes. But what I started out to say is, the only thing I've seen in the Air Force that makes it more than an elaborate, maybe a necessary joke, is you. You identify with the Air Force, and you're also a real scientist in the best meaning of the word."

"Um, thanks. I guess," she said, rattled. 

"I mean it."

"I'm not the only scientist in the Air Force."

"You're the only one I've met who combines both disciplines." He said it as though the Air Force was one more university department and Sam had a double degree. "I don't understand the military, but if you do, you must have good reason to respect it."

Sam said, "What about the colonel? I thought you respected him, in your antsy, civilian kind of way."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't know what I feel about Jack most of the time. When I do know, I'm either mad at him, or relieved that I'm not in the Air Force with him. Or both."

"You follow him." 

"I guess I trust him. I trust you and Teal'c, too." 

"Good thing," she said. "We trust you." 

It couldn't possibly be news to him. They were past issues of trust three times over, but he gave her a quizzical look, the one with the eyebrows. "You do." It wasn't quite a question.

"We do." Maybe it was a question, in a way. "I do."

"Okay." He busied himself circling an incomprehensible subset of Machello's text symbols. "You know, for a linguist I make a lousy code-cracker. Doesn't the Air Force have professionals at it?"

"Sure. But you asked what language is Machello might use — in the clear, as they say. He spent his life out where the Goa'uld are. Want to bet it's not an ancient Egyptian dialect?"

"There is that. I'm kind of taking that as an assumption." He doodled on the page a little more. "There's something I nearly see, but not quite. The symbols here are from all over the map, but you're right that they fall into patterns. They remind me of something."

"What?"

"I don't know."

Sam gave an exaggerated sigh. 

"It's not a dead end. It's a corner. What do you say we take a breathing space and look at all these again afterwards. I want to buy you some good coffee."

"Now, there's an unselfish impulse," she said, grinning.

"Philistine."

"Wonk."

He shoved back from the table and looked her in the eye. "Vulgarian."

"Geek."

He glanced pointedly at her open laptop cycling through its screen saver of the big bang. "Astro-geek."

"Esthete. Recondite snob."

"You like blue jello."

"Doesn't everyone?" she said, with faux astonishment. She'd never seen Daniel eat any kind of jello by choice.

"Nobody likes blue jello. It's a freak anomaly."

"That makes me unique."

"Sam, you're unique already. The blue jello makes you weird."

"I am?"

"Actually, the only place I've ever seen it is the SGC commissary. Maybe that makes the SGC weird." 

"I've seen it in mess halls all my life, so it could be an Air Force thing. I didn't realize it's not common outside. And what do you mean, unique?" 

"Without peer," said Daniel, setting down his last page on the table. "Come on, the Jeans Coffee Bean is only over on Citadel Drive, and if you're feeling conventional, there's a Starbucks there too." 

"You're scary, you know?"

"I keep scaring people, so I guess you're right. I just wish it worked on Jack." He picked up the jacket on the back of his chair and threw her a challenging look. "I'll drive."

"Lily-livered."

"Sam, you don't seem to have fully grasped the differences between a supersonic jet and that roadster of yours. It bothers me." 

"You just wish you could fly."

He jingled his keys. "With decent coffee, I won't need the plane."

"Caffeine addict."

"It's an avocation, not an addiction." 

"Make that 'vocation,' but all right. You buy the coffee, and I'll buy some kind of food that's not jello, and we can make a night of deciphering Machello."

"You're on."

Two cappucinos and a pound of Kenya beans later, Sam found herself wandering the aisles of a grocery store. "Pasta," she muttered. "Green vegetables."

Daniel must have heard her. "Spaghetti," he suggested. "Look, spaghetti sauce in a jar. It can't be that hard to open a jar." Sam reflected that he'd been feeding himself, somehow, for over a year and it couldn't all be take-out. He probably knew exactly how to open a jar.

"I have a salad reflex when I'm in a supermarket," she said. "I normally shop for food only when I'm in danger of scurvy."

"You have orange juice in the refrigerator. I saw it."

"I'd better get some new orange juice. That carton was from before PX7-941."

"Sam, don't you ever eat anything but blue jello and pizza?"

"MREs."

"Oh, well, if you're going to talk dirty…"

The whole situation — parading around a supermarket, as domestic as she'd ever been in her life, but with Daniel — suddenly came home to Sam, and she gasped with laughter. Daniel stopped and looked at her, and after a moment leaned back against a shelf of canned tomatoes to continue looking at her. "It wasn't that funny." 

She managed to stop, and looked up at him, enjoying the fact that someone knew what she was laughing at. "Maybe not, but I needed a laugh." 

She could see that he didn't understand exactly why she'd been laughing, but he was chuckling as he stood up and put an arm around her shoulders. "Don't take this wrong, Sam, but I really love you. You're almost crazy enough to be sane." 

She was still snickering as he released her. "I'm not nearly crazy enough, you mean. Pick out some kind of spaghetti sauce you like. You're not allergic to any of these herbs, are you?"

"No, thank god. It's all respiratory, and it's under control now." 

"Well, then." She looked over the pasta selection. "Farfallone. Bowties."

"It means butterflies, Sam."

"But—" She pointed at the package.

He looked up from the array of mouth-watering label pictures. "Ha. The Italian word means butterflies. It looks good anyway." 

"Okay, farfallone it is. And maybe some vegetables." 

# # #

Machello, in addition to his mind-switching machine — would it affect the host's mind or the Goa'uld's if a blended pair touched it? — had laid out the plans for half a dozen smaller devices, all with effects Sam could barely guess at. "Some of this stuff looks organic, or requires an organic interface."

"Interface?" asked Daniel from the other side of the now-lamp-lit table. The curtained windows had long gone dark but the coffee was holding out. Sam had remembered to get more milk while they were shopping. 

"A living person has to operate it. It could be a parallel technology to Goa'uld. Some of it looks like it's meant to work only if an unspecified component is added — maybe the human operator. We know that there are Goa'uld devices that only activate when the person holding them has naqahdah in his or her blood."

"Like that protein marker Janet said you had?"

"Yes. Maybe these devices will only work when the person doesn't have naqahdah." Sam frowned, disquieted as always at the reminder. Jolinar was bad dreams and information that never made sense. The memories disrupted her concentration on physics, on the subatomic world she knew well enough to navigate in her mind almost by intuition. Jolinar had a different map. 

She returned her thoughts determinedly to the project at hand. "Well, I didn't touch Machello's machine and Area 51 has it now. We may never know." She got up and stretched, stiffly, before she went around to his side of the table to look at the heavily pencil-marked pages. She must have been sitting still for hours. So had Daniel. "What time is it?"

He glanced at his watch. "Going on midnight. The night is young."

"Yeah," she said. "Hold still. I'll rub your neck. You've been hunched over those papers the whole day." She pushed her thumbs down to the layer of muscle below his back collar and up into his hairline, feeling the knots and tension. 

"Don't go up… never mind. Go right ahead."

"What?"

"You're right. I'm sore and it needs loosening up. Thanks."

His shirt collar, now that she was staring at it, was an unnecessarily busy plaid. Daniel was one of the few people who looked better in BDUs than when he dressed himself. He straightened upright in the chair and then sat very still while she dug fingertips into his neck in all the places that were vulnerable to inner stress instead of outer attack. After a few minutes he said, "It's okay Sam. That's enough."

"You're still pretty solid. You hunch like that whenever you're concentrating and the—"

He caught at her hand and pulled it away. "You should stop now, Sam. Please."

He was sitting rigidly still, not relaxed. "Am I hurting you after all?"

"No. It was fine. Just, not now, okay? I, uh…" He looked back at the table and reached for a page of printout with his free hand. "I should get back to work."

She finally got it, and like an idiot blurted out, "You're turned on."

"It's not important."

"Is this one of the 'part of you does it without telling you why' moments?"

"Uh…" She saw him recall the phrase: he relaxed a little. "Uh, maybe. It's really not—"

"Important. I know. Except that it must be bothersome."

"It's not the same as that. I know who you are."

Sam made a decision. She had no life outside the SGC. For now, she added, but this was now. She liked Daniel, he liked her, and he wasn't even an alien. Neither of them wanted to go further emotionally. He was, in a curious way, safe. Contained. "You know me. You trust me." She put her other hand onto his where it still touched her fingers. "I don't want anything you aren't comfortable with."

He sat very still, staring down at the table while his hand stayed between hers. "Sam, I don't— I'm not in love with you."

"I know. Me either. Do you trust me enough that it's not important?"

"I…" His hand tightened on hers. "I could." He swung around in the chair and looked at her. "It's not what you deserve." 

She shrugged. "Right now, tonight, maybe it is. It's a way of not being lonely. It's completely selfish."

"That's it. It's completely selfish. I'd be using you…" His thoughtful frown was little-boy sexy, but Sam knew that was her hormones trying to roar. Most of the time it was just silly-looking. He said, "You'd ignore me for a working model of any of these gadgets, wouldn't you?"

She couldn't help smiling. "In a millisecond. Do you know of one?"

"No, but…"

"Would it help if I dared you?" She must be regressing; that had just slipped out. She hoped it wasn't too competitive for Daniel.

"Sam, that is sooo juvenile."

"Good." This was getting to be fun.

He shook his head mock-severely at her and stood up. "You've convinced me you've been working too hard. Let's take a break from Machello." He took off his glasses and put them on the table. 

"Let's," she echoed. "C'mon, this way." She led him to her bedroom. "Just to reassure you, I'm on birth control and I don't guess we need to worry about STDs."

"Either Janet or the Goa'uld will get us first," he agreed, and she caught back a laugh.

"It's been a while," she said, working at his shirt buttons, ignoring the plaid in the merciful near-dark of the room lit only from the hallway. She was just the right height to smell his neck. 

She inhaled healthy male with traces of tomato sauce while he finished his shirt buttons and started on hers. "Feels like it's been forever," he said, low-voiced. "Long time since I've wanted to…" He rubbed down her back over her tee-shirt, a pleasant sensation that quickly escalated to erotic. She leaned into it. "… any of this."

"You really do want to do this? I'm not taking advantage of you or anything, am I?" She'd pretty much started it. 

He bent and kissed her once on the mouth. "You're not. And if you have to ask, it must have been a _really_   long time for you." He rubbed down her back again, down over her jeans, up and around to unbutton them. "Still okay?"

Feeling his fingers slide the metal button free made her suddenly dizzy and… and wet. "Oh, yeah. Okay. Do that again."

He chuckled and unzipped the jeans so he could work her tee-shirt loose around her waist. He scratched luxuriously up her back inside the shirt until he found her bra. He scratched under it for a moment and unhooked it without fuss.

"And here I thought you were an innocent guy in glasses."

"I went to three different universities and all of them were co-ed. You do the math."

She snickered. "This isn't math, it's chemistry."

"It's practically spontaneous combustion," he said. "Speaking of which…"

She found his belt buckle open and did the unbuttoning and unzipping, unable to refrain from fondling a flat abdomen. He gave a tiny gasp and held his breath as she slipped one hand down to grasp a respectable erection, curl around it and squeeze reassuringly.

"Oh, uhhhh." He took a long breath. "That feels wonderful."

"Good. Don't stop undressing me." 

"It feels so… intimate. It's like I shouldn't play with your underwear, or something."

"Isn't it more fun like that?" 

"No," he said plaintively. Warm fingers slipped gingerly under her bra straps and lifted it out of the way. "Ah, um, I think I can manage." Warm fingertips drifted over her breasts, light and maddening. "Do you mind if I just… play for a little while? I… you're really… nice."

She wasn't quite breathing steadily. "Oh, yes. Please do." She concentrated on getting the last of his clothes off, stopping only now and then to admire the smooth, spare muscles, the mostly-hairless chest, the puckering nipples. He was still tracing circles around hers, too lightly, but when she pinched, so did he. Oh, god, she felt that, straight down to her crotch. 

"Do that again," she said and reached for her panties. It was past time to get rid of them.

She wriggled and tugged, let them fall and pressed against him, feeling the four-inch difference in height and the six-inch difference in gender. Well, that was an estimate. Actually measuring would probably embarrass him. They were in this for stress relief, not statistics. He pinched her nipples again, catching them with just the right amount of pressure. Oh, god. It was going to be _great_   stress relief. "I think we should lie down," she gasped. 

Daniel made a rather strangled noise not too far from her ear. "Only if you insist. I mean, whatever you…" 

He had a hand on her waist, the other teasing downward into her pubic hair, alternately drifting and stroking, and she blushed. There wasn't enough light to see colors even if she'd had some way of seeing herself, but she just knew she was crimson with lust, and embarrassment, and even more dripping, impossible-to-hide lust. He stroked further downward and into slick, sensitive folds of flesh that already parted easily for him. She couldn't hide how deeply aroused she was now.

He kissed her neck under her ear and whispered, "Okay, Sam?"

"Oh, yeah. Long time." It was a long time since anyone else had touched her like that. "Don't stop." One finger stroked slowly through close-packed erogenous zones, not trying to single out any one spot, but faultlessly careful of them all. "Oh my god, do that again and we'll be lying down whether we get to the bed or not." To demonstrate her point, she rubbed one finger over and into his navel and felt him twitch. She tried zig-zagging down the intriguing taut line of his abdomen and explored, awkward-handed in the close quarters, as far down as she could reach into the warm thicket below. 

She heard an indrawn chuckle. "Is that a challenge? Can we do it standing up?"

"I've never…" She'd already shifted one leg sideways and was leaning onto him as two fingers repeated the gliding stroke, still faultlessly gentle; repeated it again, more than gently erotic. It wasn't penetration. It wasn't anywhere near it. It was… she wanted… A careful stroke slipped deeper, retreated, and pushed in again.

Oh. _That_   was penetration. "Ummm. Um. Two… things."

"Yes?" He wasn't anxious any more. "What? Yes." He sounded happy, even though he was doing all the work at the moment. Or maybe she was just insane with lust and was taking everything she could get. Sam was pretty sure she wouldn't know the difference right now. Oh, god, it didn't feel like this when she did it herself. Not as good, not as reckless. His fingers were warmer or harder or something.

"One." She stopped to breathe as the insanely wonderful stroking happened again. "Um, one. Yes. That's so good you have to keep going. Please. All the way." One long, slow stroke retreated nearly away and hovered where she could barely feel it, then returned just far enough to press reassuringly. 

"And?" His voice breathed husky suggestion and arousal in her ear.

"Um, and." She wasn't really standing up. She was leaning against him and hanging on with all the parts of her that weren't completely absorbed with wet friction and lust. One finger idled between her legs, touching, sometimes pressing, not enough. "Two, I dare you. To finish this. Standing up." One finger became two, stroking now, and sliding deeper into her, sliding out, staying there at the edge of bearable sensation while she shivered against him. 

"Yes," he breathed, but she'd forgotten what it meant. His breath was warm, his body was warm and his cock was hot where it pressed against her side while he kept her from falling. Each sliding wet stroke was incandescent heat at its apex until one last quiver lit it off and combustion shot through her from the center out. 

She was still leaning against Daniel, clutching at the arm around her waist, clutching inwardly at the presence inside that still felt as though it were glowing. She blushed again, hard enough that it heated her nipples. She hadn't had an orgasm like that in so long she couldn't remember if she ever had. 

"Want to lie down now?" he asked, the last word catching as if he were laughing, or maybe just panting. 

"Just don't stop."

"Not for long," he said, and the hand buried between her legs twitched and gently, carefully disengaged, leaving her itching with completion. "Here we are." He let her collapse at last onto a smooth cotton sheet and followed her there. A hand — which? did it matter? — skimmed over her body, lightly over stomach and breasts, up to her face.

She caught it and held it to her mouth to kiss, and let her head roll sideways enough to see him looking at her. "Come here, now. Your turn."

"Now?"

"Now would be wonderful. Right now, in me, on top of me, right where I'm still feeling hot." 

"Hot?" he said softly, but he was scrambling to match her embrace.

"Incandescent. A first-sequence star."

He did laugh then, but it stopped on a gasp when she found his penis and struggled under him until they were mated, hot and wet together. He gasped again and said, "This will be over too fast." 

"It's not over till it's over," she panted, feeling him inside her. She shifted and squirmed around him, unable to hold still. 

He caught his breath and looked down at her, face barely visible. "Okay." He pushed deeper into her, pulled out, groaned and pushed again, and she didn't have to squirm any more. 

She watched him lose all control, felt it, held him while he took the oldest pleasure there was. First-sequence. Not complicated, just hot.

He groaned and fell into himself, eyes closed at last, and most of his weight come down onto her. Sam let him rest there for a few minutes, heavy as he was. Elemental man, she thought, and with a ripple of humor, atomic weight, somewhere around ytterbium. When she wanted to breath again, she rolled a little and tipped them both onto their sides.

Daniel woke, eyes unfocused. "Sam?" 

"Yes, it's me."

"Oh. Good."

Was that relief in his voice? Sam said, "It was."

He digested that a moment and then caught his breath in a laugh. "Okay. Yes, it was. Oh, definitely." His eyes opened again. "Sam?"

"Hmmm?"

"I hate to interrupt this moment, but I think I know what I was trying to find in Machello's code."

Work-related sex, Sam thought dreamily, ideally leads to better work. "In the symbol groups?" 

"Yes. I've been assuming they corresponded to Goa'uld ideograms, but what if he really was making up his own language — for technical notation, anyway; it wouldn't be a language in the usual sense — and those are concepts the Goa'uld don't write down. That is, they haven't in anything I've seen. That is… have you seen anything with the gadgets we've picked up that could be a technical explanation, anywhere?"

"The thing we thought was a time-capsule that was covered in tiny symbols. The one that woke up and put out spikes." 

They were lying nose to nose, bodies still joined until Daniel stretched a little and then, after a sticky moment, they weren't. He brushed her hair out of her eyes and breathed, close as a lover, "That wasn't a Goa'uld thing. The language wasn't any of theirs. Anything else?"

"No," said Sam. She wanted to clean up, except that she wanted even more to hear where this thought was going. "I could miss it, maybe, but I've never looked at any part of a zat gun or anything that had writing on it where you might want to see "on" or "off" or "caution, this component is hot." The only markings on any of it are System Lords' symbols." 

"Sign of ownership," he murmured.

"Don't tell Teal'c."

"Teal'c knows," said Daniel, suddenly less abstract. "But, anyway, Machello wrote about things the Goa'uld don't have notation for, that we know of. It could be more like a computer language than a real one, well, than a human means of social communication. If it's technical descriptions refined to a code in the same sense COBOL is a code…"

"We should be working from the schematics to the text," she finished, light dawning. "I'll look at it with you. Um, after a shower. Is there any coffee left?"

"I'll make fresh. Can I use your shower afterward?" 

"Sure."

He sat up and looked around vaguely. Sam remembered that his glasses were in the dining room. "Daniel?" she said, picking up his shirt from the foot of the bed, "you're a sweetie." She leaned up and kissed him quickly. 

He looked a little startled. "Oh. But, you're beautiful." Then he smiled. "And, I love your mind."

She couldn't help it; she laughed. "I think I believe that."

# # #


End file.
